2. ‘Ourselves in fur’

On animals in clothes

Randolph Caldecott’s picture book Baby Bunting (1882) has no text beyond the short nursery rhyme:

Bye, Baby Bunting!

Father’s gone a-hunting,

Gone to fetch a Rabbit-skin,

To wrap the Baby Bunting in.

The illustrations fill out the story to comic effect. Caldecott shows the father failing at hunting, and finally reduced to going to the shops to buy a rabbit skin. We then see Baby Bunting enjoying their present, crawling on all fours in a cute long-eared rabbit suit. But after the rhyme ends, we turn the page to see an additional image that, like the Paradise that Caldecott’s fellow ‘Triumvirate’ member Kate Greenaway painted for The Pied Piper of Hamelin, adds a very different dimension to the text. It shows the mother and her rabbit-wrapped toddler on a country walk, passing a cluster of real rabbits.

In his marvellous essay on Caldecott, Maurice Sendak writes: ‘I’d give anything to have an original drawing of that baby! – Baby is staring with the most perplexed look at those rabbits, as though with the dawning knowledge that the lovely, cuddly, warm costume she’s wrapped in has come from those creatures.’ It is indeed an astonishing moment: is the baby suddenly aware of the pain of others? Of guilt?

Clothes are a marker of civilization. But they are also Adam’s curse – the cover for our shameful nakedness; consequence of our sin. The picture is shocking, because it reveals what picture books so often carefully evade: the things that human beings do. Rabbits are a symbol of innocence because they are prey animals, almost defenceless. We, on the other hand, are apex predators.

There have always been animal stories. Stories are another way we exploit creatures – they are our meat, our clothes, our shelters, our guards, our transport, our workers, our company, our metaphors. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests that humans have long known animals are not only ‘good to eat’ but ‘good to think’. Early religious stories often treat animals with a sense of awe. Egyptian gods have the heads of the lion or falcon. But by the time Aesop, by tradition an African slave, began to tell his fables in the sixth century BC, some of us had begun to feel comfortably superior. In his tales, animals are simple signifiers for human characteristics – the tortoise slow and steady, the peacock self-regarding, the wolf a tyrant – and they are all put on earth to illustrate our points. G. K. Chesterton describes them as less like animals than ‘pieces in a game of chess’.

By the eighteenth century, animals were moving into the nursery, via moral tales such as Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783) or Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786) about a family of robins. Understandable, perhaps, as another of the things we do to animals is to tame them: we domesticate them; overpower them; make them obey. We also tame children. The similarity between these two processes does much to explain how common animals have become in picture books, especially farm animals or pets. We make these creatures walk upright, like circus ponies. We put Anubis in mittens and a sweater and use him to teach three-year-olds how to behave. Maisy Mouse uses a zebra crossing. Peppa Pig goes to the dentist. Pip the rabbit forgets to ask for the toilet, wets himself and has to change his pants.

The first truly famous clothed animal in picture books is Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. A descendant of both Carroll’s White Rabbit and Brer Rabbit, the trickster of African-American folklore popularized by Joel Chandler Harris, he is a kind of hybrid. Half tame but still half wild. In illustrations, Peter is sometimes upright, sometimes on all fours like his true cunicular self. He is liable to lose his small blue coat and shoes when he is most vulnerable or foolish, as if his claims to semi-human status slide away. His father was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor (the original 1901 edition contains a picture of this, with a faint, blond toddler waving his fork in anticipation), and Peter is in danger of the same fate. But by a sleight of hand, the book doesn’t turn small readers vegetarian. Instead, by making us see the world from Peter’s angle – as the novelist and critic Alison Lurie notes, ‘the vantage point in her exquisite watercolours varies from a few inches to a few feet above the ground, like that of a toddler’ – the child becomes Peter, the vulnerable hero. The farmer, with his long white beard, shaking his fist and rake, seems to stand for all grown-ups, while Peter, greedy for mischief and radishes, is every child.

Beatrix Potter’s brilliance is in the path she walks between sentiment and savagery. The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit, supposedly one of her stories for babies and originally printed on a strip of paper and sealed with a ribbon, is one of the most morally harsh. A rabbit takes a carrot from another rabbit without saying ‘please’, scratching him in the process. He has his whiskers and tail shot off by a man with a gun. The end. Is the human somehow an agent of divine retribution? An eye for an eye and a tail for a carrot.

Potter would boil dead birds to get a better look at their skeletons, so her beasts are anatomically correct, and she doesn’t deceive us as to their diets. Subtle hints of humanness, rather than softening her characters’ behaviour, often make that behaviour more sinister by introducing an element of premeditation. Jeremy Fisher’s butterfly sandwich or roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce are more grotesque for their preparation. The fact that the fox, Mr Tod, lives in a house in his skull-strewn wood, with a lock on the door and a carving knife that twinkles in the moonlight, makes for a darker nightmare. Mr Jackson, Mrs Tittlemouse’s uninvited guest, is all latent violence, pacing down her passageways muttering ‘Tiddly, widdly’, wiping his mouth with his coat-sleeve, devouring the littlest creepy-crawly people. The gobbling of Jemima Puddle-Duck’s beloved eggs by puppies is made much darker by the fact that they were ‘saving’ her from the fox in that familiar, last-minute dash of popular fiction. In The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, even the squirrels are complicit in slaughter when they offer the owl Old Brown, in exchange for nuts, three fat mice, a fine mole and seven minnows as a blood sacrifice.

It is on the uneasy border between human and animal where Potter works; where she reminds us that we live.

Despite her love of nature, Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) spent most of her life a tamed thing, kept in dull, expensive isolation on the top floor of a house in South Kensington, without any friends her own age. London’s rows of houses shut her in like ‘great frowning hills’. She had long bouts of illness and tiredness. Her journals are chilling in their depiction of something close to psychological abuse – at nineteen her father took her out on a rare trip to an exhibition and her hat blew off. ‘He does not often take me out,’ she wrote. ‘I doubt he will do it again for a long time.’

It has been suggested there is something autobiographical in the attractive but comfortless doll’s house of The Two Bad Mice, with its lobsters, ham, pudding and pears that won’t come off the plates though they are ‘extremely beautiful’. But at least Beatrix and her brother Bertram had many pets over the years, which animated the nursery floor and gave Potter much-needed friendship: dogs, rats, various rabbits (including Benjamin H. Bouncer, who she would walk on a lead, and Peter, who could drum a tambourine), a tortoise, bats, lizards, a ring snake called Sally, an owl, a kestrel, a jay (which killed a bat ‘in a disgusting fashion’), a frog called Punch, Mrs Tiggy the hedgehog, mice called Hunca Munca and Xarifa, various snails including Lord and Lady Salisbury, and a robin without tail feathers (that she later freed).

Potter was thirty-five before her first book came out in 1901. It began as a letter to the sick child of her former governess. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was rejected by six publishers before she self-published it – but in doing so, she moved the picture book into the twentieth century. One innovation was that the books were, unlike the heavy, expensive nursery books of that time, small enough to fit into a child’s pocket and only cost a shilling, but she was also original in other ways. Potter began the movement away from poetry anthologies towards our contemporary model of picture books as single, original stories. She also pioneered ideas like deliberately including at least one difficult word in each book, in order to help expand the children’s vocabulary. (I am looking at some now and trying to guess which words. I suspect: ponderously, disconsolately, alacrity, conspicuous, indigestible, conscientiously, soporific.)

Soon she had ‘real’ publishers – Frederick Warne & Co. Norman Warne understood her meticulous eye, buying doll’s house furniture for her to base her drawings on in The Two Bad Mice, for example (because doll’s house furniture isn’t quite the same as full-size furniture), and they entered into a lively correspondence. She also led the way in children’s book merchandising. After a disastrous episode in which her books were pirated after her publishers forgot to register the US copyright, Potter became very attentive to patents. If Peter Rabbit is the first great twentieth-century picture book, Potter’s business acumen set a precedent that would be keenly followed – by 1904 she had already designed a Peter Rabbit doll and board game, with painting books and pottery coming swiftly afterwards. Exploiting family links with the textile business, she also sold the rights to her images for nursery wallpaper and fabrics. (Interestingly, though, despite her eye for an opportunity, she did prevent Walt Disney from producing an animated movie in 1938, saying: ‘it seems that a succession of figures can be joggled together to give an impression of motion. I don’t think the pictures would be satisfactory … I am not troubling myself about it.’)

In July 1905 Potter became engaged to Norman Warne, with whom she had finally found companionship and love. He died a month later, of lymphatic leukaemia. Despite this tragedy, Potter had been given a taste of freedom from her parents, so was not prepared to give it up.

Soon afterwards, she bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District. When she arrived it needed a great deal of work – apparently, amongst other problems, housing ninety-six rats. The struggle with daughterly duties and grief continued. In his famous essay on Potter, Graham Greene labelled 1907–9 her dark period (and when Greene says that, it must be seriously dark) – but she had more air to breathe, at least. It was at Hill Top she invented Samuel Whiskers, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Pigling Bland, the Flopsy Bunnies, Timmy Tiptoes, Ginger and Pickles, Tom Kitten and those ‘two disagreeable people’ Tommy Brock and Mr Tod.

Hill Top is now run by the National Trust. If you visit the property with its hearth, dark rooms and crooked panes that turn the sheep wobbly, you can see some of the objects she amassed there over the years: tiny leather gloves; early examples of christening beakers and plates decorated with her characters. There are also two wonderful Caldecott prints that Potter chose from the many in her father’s possession after his death, one of which depicts small children watching a trap in a snowy field, rapt as a bird edges closer.

Beside it, though, is a tableau of heartbreak. The doll’s house Potter bought because she could not bear to throw away the furniture Norman Warne gave her.

At school I was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle in an infant play, which might explain why it is still my favourite Beatrix Potter book. Graham Greene praises the way Potter can ‘draw a portrait in one sentence’, singling out: ‘My name is Mrs Tiggy-Winkle; oh yes if you please’m, I’m an excellent clear-starcher.’ I didn’t have to wear her prickles, just a pinafore and cap, and had to fuss with washing and an iron, anthropomorphized all the way to human.

In The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, clothes are not optional extras for birds and beasts, who must in fact get dressed in their furs and feathers each morning. A little girl called Lucie encounters a hedgehog called Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, and watches while she irons Cock Robin’s bright waistcoat and launders Sally Henny-penny’s yellow stockings. There are also Tabby Kitten’s mittens, Tom Titmouse’s starched shirt-fronts, the woolly coats of lambs, and a moleskin waistcoat. Every animal, it seems, obeys some kind of sumptuary law. They are not naked and free but, like obedient children, wearing their pressed, smartest best. Lucie seems disgusted by even the smallest flashes of animal she perceives in Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, who is figured as lower class, with her brown, wrinkled, soapy hands.

In the end, the shawl and frilled cap melt away. The separation between humans and animals returns, and the hedgehog flees from Lucie in naked fear. In the girl’s eyes Mrs Tiggy-Winkle seems utterly diminished by losing her clothes. She shrinks and dulls, losing her title, role, security and magic, as she is exposed as ‘nothing but’ a hedgehog. Except she isn’t. There is a bracketed addendum from Potter in smaller type:

(Now some people say that little Lucie had been asleep upon the stile – but then how could she have found three clean pocket-handkins and a pinny, pinned with a silver safety-pin?

And besides – I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells – and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-winkle!)

It is a conjuring trick that reminds me of the poet John Keats’ idea of negative capability (described in a letter as ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason’). Potter allows the child to be both doubter and dreamer, realist and believer, quite aware of what ‘some people’ say, but choosing, nonetheless, the storyteller’s better truth.

Beatrix Potter was soon much imitated. By 1929 another writer eighteen years younger, Alison Uttley, along with illustrator Margaret Tempest, had also created a world of animals in clothes called The Squirrel, the Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit. Uttley grew up in rural Derbyshire, a childhood lightly fictionalized in her stunning children’s novel The Country Child (1931) with its descriptions of a lost world of stirring milk with hazel wands, collecting cowslips, haymaking, posies and candlelight. Extremely bright, she obtained a scholarship at Manchester University to read physics, going on to teach. She began to write when her adored (or, at least, smothered) son John was sent to boarding school, in order to keep telling him tales. When her husband committed suicide soon afterwards, aged forty-seven, by drowning himself in the river Mersey (nagged to death, his relations believed), it also became a matter of financial necessity. She went on to be so successful that she could afford to buy a Brueghel, although her diaries show a woman who found it hard to be happy. Uttley hated comparisons with Beatrix Potter, who she felt was a jumped-up illustrator and a ‘rude, old woman’, whereas she believed herself to be a great storyteller. ‘A spinner of tales’, as it says on her grave. The diaries are also full of bitchiness about Margaret Tempest, who she never forgave for being paid more on their first collaboration (calling her ‘a humourless bore’).

If Potter dealt in bad rabbits, the Little Grey Rabbit is saintly – the critic Frances Wilson has called her a ‘flopsy domestic goddess’. In the first book, her servile relationship to Squirrel and Hare is deeply uncomfortable. In her dress with ‘white collar and cuffs’ she looks like their maid, and like a maid must sweep, dust, lay the table and make tea from daisy heads before they get up. Hare is bored of lettuce for breakfast and sends the Little Grey Rabbit out in search of carrots at risk of her life (at one point a sack is thrown over her). In a scene I find absolutely chilling, the Little Grey Rabbit asks Wise Old Owl how to grow carrots, and in order to get the answer is told, to her horror, that she must give up her tail. She bravely asks that he ‘be quick’, before he cuts it off with ‘one bite of his strong beak’ and wraps the stump in a cobweb.

Why does she make this sacrifice of her own body for the conceited Hare’s whims? When she returns to the house, he even labels her lack of tail ‘disgraceful’ and makes her blush and hang her head. By the end of the story, after she saves Squirrel and Hare from a Weasel, they apologize and offer her a breakfast of toast and coffee in bed, but she tells them: ‘I like to work, and I don’t want toast and coffee.’ Whether she is modelling the behaviour of a housewife or a servant, the message is that some people can be violated and exploited, and this is their choice.

The name of your first pet plus your mother’s maiden name is famously your ‘porn-star name’. Mine is Twinkle Cranshaw. Twinkle was a goldfish, christened after my favourite magazine and bought in a clear plastic bag at a fair. Classic first pet.

Naming pets is, for small children, often the best part of having them. My son has three fish – little platies: one the colour of a clementine, one dirty gold, one the lapis blue of a beautiful old pot. He has called them Bing, Bang and Bong (or as his father and I know them, after taking them on a few ‘trips to the vet’: Bing II, Bang IV and Bong I). He also has a pet woodlouse, Dank, who he looks for in our garden most evenings in the summer. ‘Hi, Dank,’ he says, his voice warm with recognition, when he identifies the one under the log who is definitely Dank.

He has always adored animals and would like a bigger pet, although I have seen him with next door’s cats and can already guess how that would play out – years of painful unrequited love as the cat refuses to play with him, then leaps the fence. I am also generally uneasy about the enslavement of animals into service as human companions. In my experience it never worked out well. My cat, Pizza, scratched my baby sister so badly he had to be put down. My hamster, Anastasia, died of obesity in a cage that always smelt pissy however often we changed her sawdust. We had a budgie, named Peter Scudamore after my father’s favourite racing jockey, who we hoped would sit on our shoulders and chatter. Instead he flew every day to the mirror and stayed, banging his head against the glass.

The question of whether humans can bring happiness to animals leads us to The Story of Babar, produced by the artist Jean de Brunhoff in 1931, and based on a bedtime tale his wife Cécile made up for his two small sons. Many consider it a pivotal moment in the genre due to the intricate, graceful colour images that often spread across two pages; the interplay of text and image, which seems to set the standard. Brunhoff wrote and illustrated six more Babar books before he died of tuberculosis, aged only thirty-seven.

The Story of Babar begins with a little elephant born in the Great Forest to a loving mother. By the fifth page she is dead, shot by a hunter who now runs towards Babar to catch him.

The birds are fleeing off the page, the monkey has hidden his head in a bush, but Babar stays on top of his mother’s slumped body – two straight lines of tiny, dark tears pouring downwards from his face. It is perhaps the most upsetting image in the history of the picture book – the total grief of a child losing a parent, mixed with our fear that something terrible might happen to the child. It is the precursor to the death of Bambi’s mother, or the bit we fast-forward through at the start of Pixar movies like Finding Nemo or The Good Dinosaur.

If Babar’s mother’s death feels unnecessarily cruel, it is worth acknowledging the argument of the critic Bettina Hürlimann that the books were written by a dying young father, who contracted TB in his early thirties, and who saw the books as a way of speaking to his children after his death. This is a moving thesis, and one that might explain why Babar’s grief never seems to get processed. Babar runs to a town. It looks like Paris and is filled with white people like those who killed his mother. What could be more frightening? Yet almost the first thing he thinks to himself on arrival is: ‘What lovely clothes they have got!’ He meets a rich old lady who notes his desire and gives him her purse. Within hours Babar is kitted out at a huge department store with a shirt, collar and tie, a ‘delightful’ green suit, a bowler hat, shoes and spats. Rather than mourning, Babar is an example of a creature who can live in the moment and take life’s pleasures where he can (mainly from the wardrobe). Brunhoff shows us that the worst can happen, yet life goes on.

Unlike all the other clothed animals in picture books, we actually see how Babar procures his shirts – we are given a kind of genesis myth. Indeed the whole book is on some level about clothes. When he meets his cousins, Celeste and Arthur, the first thing Babar does is dress them (their reward is a trip to the patisserie). When he returns to the Great Forest all the elephants shout: ‘What lovely clothes!’ It is on the basis of his suit, symbol of how much he has learnt, that he becomes King – or should I say, he is offered the crown. Published by an imprint of Condé Nast, the book is so obsessed with style that some have wondered if this is coincidence.

It has also been argued, by critics such as Ariel Dorfman and Herbert Kohl, that Babar’s clothes symbolize the colonial project. To be upright, bathed, and dressed in the best French tailoring is to be given the right to rule, and in the third book, Babar the King, Babar swiftly turns the Great Forest into ‘Celesteville’ (named after his Queen), a European-style city with straight boulevards, a port, a library, formal gardens with a touch of Versailles about them. He also constructs a ‘Palace of Work’ and a ‘Palace of Pleasure’, introducing a capitalist system whereby these activities are strictly separated, and where an atomized workforce must now each take a specialized job – shoemaker, mechanic, clown, road sweeper, soldier. A prize-giving is initiated to make the children compete against each other.

For the inaugural garden party a small choir sings the ‘Song of the Elephants’ in what sounds suspiciously like a mock-African tongue: ‘PATALI DIRAPATA / CROMDA CROMDA RIPALO / PATA PATA / KO KO KO’. But none of the elephants present, it is noted, know what the words mean any more: their native language has been extinguished. As in Scottish author Helen Bannerman’s notorious picture book The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), where the names of the South Indian boy’s mother, Black Mumbo, and father, Black Jumbo, piece together to mock their language as primitive nonsense (mumbo-jumbo), the colonized culture is reduced to funny noises.

I find it almost impossible not to take pleasure in the images of the Babar books – they are so delicate and original. Pictures like the wedding party, or the hot-air balloon sweeping over the coast and blue sea (Brunhoff’s rapturous blues!) are pure delight. My own favourite pages, for their sheer surreal strangeness, show a host of angelic elephants labelled LOVE, HOPE, JOY, GOODNESS, chasing away the curious bestiary of SLOTH, COWARDICE, STUPIDITY and DISEASE (the latter is like an earless hound, whose mouth is a hose spraying toxic particles). But enjoyment makes the reader, like Babar when he covets the lovely green suit, complicit. I feel the impulse to defend the artist who was so absurdly talented and died so horribly young, but I also have to recognize that he had internalized the values of his society, and those values were problematic.

This is a fantasy of Africa as terra nullius, where the white people meet only elephants and monkeys. It is not until the second book, Babar’s Travels, that there is an encounter with blackness, after Babar and Celeste land on an island with natives described as ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’. Babar fights them. There is a double-page spread of wounded and dying black bodies. It is both technically beautiful and actually evil. Babar shows us these things can co-exist.

The critic Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, tried to justify the books on the grounds that they satisfy us with ‘the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.’ But is it really? Any child would know that this is nonsense. Gopnik might feel more secure living in a house near a park, but to suggest that it’s the case for any living being is to erase our differences. And why is safety what we aspire to anyway? The promise of ‘protection’ is what the powerful historically use to keep us in line.

Sadly, the Babar books are propaganda for the powerful. They say we must dress properly, work hard and internalize their values. We must respect those in charge, even when they kill our parents.

Animal stories, though, have always relied on a kind of essentialism – call it speciesism – that is so close to racism as to perhaps make such ugliness inevitable. When Arthur N. Applebee, writer of The Child’s Concept of Story (1978), asked school children to describe the personality traits of various animals, he found they were surer of the characters of those they knew exclusively from books: brave lions, sly foxes. Once they moved on to animals they had actually met, like dogs, their answers became less definite and more nuanced. English-language children’s books constantly urge readers to trust their instincts and rely on snap judgements; to make assumptions about creatures based on their physical appearance – sneaky rats, proud peacocks, mischievous monkeys, sly snakes, wise owls with their spectacle-eyes (although I was assured at a falconry class once that owls are actually poor at problem-solving, and in India they symbolize foolishness). We’re encouraged to judge the genus by our very flawed, human projections on to them, and then the individual by the genus.

The very worst example of this is the picture book published during the Third Reich, Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath by Elvira Bauer and Philipp Rupprecht. It was published by Julius Streicher, who would later be found guilty of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, under his Stürmer-Verlag imprint in 1936. This foul book teaches children how to ‘identify’ Jews by their appearance and names. It compares them to foxes who are similarly ‘seen everywhere as a pest’ and were associated in Germany with both sneakiness and spreading rabies. The book’s ‘Jews’ are also depicted next to crows – birds thought to carry out the Devil’s work. As war spread many adults wanted to return to the certainties of their childhood: a world where the wolf is always evil; a lamb reproachless.

The antidote to this, though, is Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s The Story of Ferdinand, published the same year, about a bull who doesn’t want to compete in a Madrid bullfight, preferring to smell the flowers. It was released three months after the start of the Spanish Civil War by Viking Press, although they considered holding it back until ‘the world settles down’. By 1938 it was a surprise bestseller in the United States, beating even Gone with the Wind. Its seemingly pacifist message unsurprisingly resulted in it being banned in Spain until after Franco’s death. In Nazi Germany, Hitler ordered it burned.

It also irritated Ernest Hemingway enough for him to write a short story called ‘The Faithful Bull’ that starts: ‘One time there was a bull whose name was not Ferdinand and he cared nothing for flowers.’ Hemingway ends his tale with a hideous formulation that has the ring of propaganda: ‘the man who killed him admired him the most.’

The thirties and forties were busy times for picture books. Publishers began launching their first children’s divisions – the Caldecott Medal was established in 1938, the first Puffin Picture Book was launched in 1940, and Simon and Schuster’s Little Golden Books started in 1942. Although the Second World War briefly caused cutbacks in materials, it also seemed to increase demand for books relating to the innocent, carefree world of childhood. Afterwards, the post-war baby boom expanded the market, as did the establishment of things like children’s library services in the UK. Publishers began thinking carefully about marketing. Who was buying these books? Not the children. How to please the reader, and yet also appeal to the buyer: the mother, the teacher, the librarian?

In the history of picture books, the writer Margaret Wise Brown is, like Beatrix Potter, one of the great heroines. Her youth was also marked by a love of nature. She claimed to have grown up ‘along the beaches and in the woods of Long Island Sound’, burning leaves, or collecting shells and cherries. She had a full menagerie of quirky pets (squirrels, a collie dog, a hare, hens, fish, a robin who returned every spring, and, apparently, thirty-six rabbits) and after she obtained her first book deal, she asked a flower-seller to deliver a whole cartful of flowers to her New York apartment. Brown was striking: tall, with green eyes and hair the colour of timothy grass (her nickname was ‘Tim’). She had scandalous affairs both with men and with a glamorous older woman known as Michael Strange. She died tragically young of a blood clot, after showing a nurse how well she felt by kicking up her legs in a can-can.

Brown deserves to be remembered as someone who brought an incredible sophistication to picture books in this exciting period of growth. Refusing to dumb down, her texts drew inspiration from Gertrude Stein, and the art suggestion she sent to illustrator Clement Hurd for her famous Goodnight Moon was a reproduction of Goya’s ‘Red Boy’ (‘Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga’) with his green cage of finches and magpie on a lead. She began writing at a time when most books were printed in a basic palette of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. At first she worked with Lucy Sprague Mitchell on the influential ‘Here and Now’ series, which aimed to produce more realistic juvenile literature that rejected fantasy in favour of the ordinary surroundings of the children, and was aimed squarely at kindergarten teachers. She worked hard doing research; taking children to the docks and the zoo to see what they noticed, and testing early material on classes. From these basic beginnings, her confidence in her vision began to grow.

After some early successes, Brown was lobbying to pay illustrators more and to use blended colours. She began writing under several pseudonyms for various publishers, often penning four titles a year for Little Golden Books alone – a series produced in bulk and sold in drug and department stores, making picture books affordable to many families for the first time (their idealistic sales slogan was ‘Books and Bread’). After the Second World War, as new printing techniques became possible, Brown was at the forefront of innovation, hand-making prototypes: pages cut into animal shapes, novelty add-ons like a watch or a mouse on a ribbon, pull-out posters, glow-in-the-dark paint.

The publisher Brown worked for as an editor, William R. Scott, Inc., experimented with some of the earliest ‘textural’ books, precursors of all the modern board books with fuzzy and bumpy patches, including a wordless rag book called Cottontails (1938) with buttons, bows, beads and rabbits’ tails Brown helped stitch on. In 1940 Brown’s contemporary, Dorothy Kunhardt, had a hit for Simon & Schuster with the similarly textural Pat the Bunny, with its peekaboo rag and shiny mirror (‘Now YOU pat the bunny’) and its witty advertising campaign that declared: ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls is magnificent – but it hasn’t any bunny in it.’ Ever competitive, Brown’s own book with illustrator Garth Williams, Little Fur Family (1946), soon took this idea of tactile books for small children even further. The tale of a little fur child, who lives in a cosy home, venturing out into the world and encountering other creatures, its first print run had a cover made of real rabbit skin. The book retailed at $1.75, but there was also a limited-edition mink version at $15. Ursula Nordstrom, Brown’s editor, later said that she knew the book would be hugely successful when she received a letter from a mother whose boy had held his copy open at dinner and attempted to feed it.

(The moths in Harper’s warehouse loved it too, so the next edition was fake fur.)

Margaret Wise Brown is best known, as it happens, for two other books about rabbits, both illustrated by Clement Hurd. The first, The Runaway Bunny, published during the Second World War in 1942, is based on a Provençal French ballad, ‘Les Métamorphoses’, in which a lover promises their beloved that ‘if you change into a fish / I will change into an eel / And I will eat you’, and that even if they die ‘I will change into dust on your grave / And I will wed you’. It is an unsettling poem that hints at an obsessive, abusive relationship, but Brown thought children would enjoy its catchy ‘if you, then I’ formula. She decided, inspired by child psychology, to base it on the stage at which children want to make their first independent steps, but are also filled with separation anxiety. In it, then, a young rabbit plots myriad ways to escape, and his mother tells him how she will find him. Brown wrote it on a skiing holiday, scrawling it down on the back of a ski receipt, before Clement Hurd was commissioned to do the images.

Between them they created something that is an oddly changeable text, depending how you hold it to the light. Hurd’s pink-eyed white rabbits have strangely emotionless faces, on which we can project our own ambiguous feelings. Sometimes the book is deeply moving and reassuring – the bunny says he will become a bird, the mother says she’ll be the tree he comes home to (a bunny-shaped tree is drawn with its branches as open arms). The child is testing the limits of adult love, finding that there are none.

On other readings, the mother’s promise to become a fisherman if her child turns into a fish sounds like a threat. Even if the little bunny becomes a boat and sails far away, he will be unable to escape his mother’s influence. She will be the wind and ‘blow you where I want you to go’ (her face appears in a cloud, like a vengeful god’s). Childhood is figured as a state of being under surveillance. In the end the little bunny submits to the impossibility of escape, settling for a carrot in his burrow.

The date of publication seems relevant. Perhaps in 1942 the idea of a son setting off alone on adventures overseas held a different charge. Perhaps all mothers wanted to believe that they would still be with their children, somehow, wherever in the world they went.

Harper marketed the book heavily to parents and grandparents, placing ads in consumer magazines suggesting it was the perfect Easter gift, and printing postcards for bookshops to slip in bags. They must have realized this book’s appeal was not so much to the child as to the adult’s ego: their romantic sense of themselves as ardent protector. The book is the precursor to Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram’s Guess How Much I Love You or all those books called things like I Love My Daddy or Mummy is Magic, which I suspect are mainly bought by the named adult. Brown’s book was an enormous hit.

In Brown’s second classic, Goodnight Moon, the rabbit is much less rabbity. It only, in fact, became a rabbit in editorial meetings, as Clement Hurd, who was again illustrating, felt he was better at drawing them than children. It has become a cipher for a child, who lives not in a burrow but a vast, off-kilter room, surrounded by the trappings of civilization – art, a doll’s house, mittens, a comb, a telephone. She says goodnight to each object in what feels like a ritual to induce comfort. Originally, apparently, the book was meant to end ‘goodnight cucumber, goodnight fly’, which would have made it funnier, but the revision was clever – this book is not meant to induce giggles or flights of fancy, but yawns. In a way, like The Runaway Bunny, it’s also a book meant to make the child submit.

Goodnight Moon is picture book as lullaby; as bedtime routine; as the parent’s little helper. A lullabook. At the time, this was ground-breaking, and puzzled many with its lack of story, but now it is much mimicked (even spawning the enormously successful adult parody Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés). Even the weirdest line of the original – ‘goodnight nobody, goodnight mush’ – feels sleep-inducing, like the babblings of a child hallucinatory with tiredness.

It’s also considered one of the first examples of an animal in a picture book as simply (in critic Margaret Blount’s phrase) ‘ourselves in fur’. So far is the rabbit removed from animality that even the picture of a cow’s udder on her wall has been blurred to avoid offence.

We barely think of the rabbit as a rabbit at all, just a little girl so sweetly tucked in with her rabbit suit.

Brown’s animals are sugared versions of ourselves: paler, gentler. In The Color Kittens, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, and another of Brown’s hit books, the protagonists are called Brush and Hush – soft, smoothing words. These kittens are dressed as little workmen, and their work is explicitly human: art, artifice, dream, the creation of fantasy realms where Easter eggs dance on tiny legs.

But like Beatrix Potter (who boiled up corpses to see their anatomy better) Brown did not anthropomorphize animals in life – she loved to hunt, keeping pace with hounds on foot. Her biography by Amy Gary describes a scene in which Brown hunts deer with her lover James Stillman Rockefeller Jr (also known as ‘Pebble’) and then, when the kill is cut open, holds the ‘still-warm heart in her hands’, radiant as Snow White’s mother.

Picture all the children in their bedrooms stroking the cute and cosy copy of Little Fur Family, its cover peeled from the rabbit’s flesh and sinew – an estimated 15,000 having been skinned to produce the 50,000 copies. We are so young when we learn not to ask about the suffering of others. If we feel warm and safe, it is best not to think too hard about how and why. It is best to tell ourselves different stories.

In Little Fur Family, the fur child finds a tiny version of itself. Kisses it and sends it on its way.

As rabbits become more anthropomorphized, we might notice something else happens. Unlike Peter, or Pooh’s friend Rabbit, the rabbit in Goodnight Moon is a girl. This gendering of creatures is something that becomes increasingly noticeable over the history of picture books.

When my son was born and I first ventured into Mothercare’s clothes department, I realized that almost everything in the world has now been segregated into masculine or feminine categories. Girls could count, for example, on all the pastels (except blue) plus purple and hot pink, while red and green were siding with the XY chromosome. In terms of territory, the boys most definitely got the sea, including whales, crabs, anchors, navy stripes and all who sailed on it. They also got space – astronauts and monsters fight the male corner. Oh, and they got the past (dinosaurs) and the future (robots) and all modes of transport. In the animal kingdom, the tigers, bears, crocodiles, sharks, lions and monkeys – anything viewed as strong, meat-eating, cheeky or violent – had clearly been recruited for the boys while the meeker, smaller, milkier creatures such as mice or kittens were with the girls. They also had allies in butterflies, ponies and birds.

Yellow and elephants, like Switzerland, were neutral.

Miffy is a girl, her frock as simple as the sign on a woman’s toilet cubicle.

Is Miffy the very essence of rabbit? Or the least rabbity rabbit of all?

Born in 1955, she could be viewed as the progenitor of the ‘first experiences’ genre, which has since bred like you know what. Trina Schart Hyman railed against the ubiquity of these stories in 1986, claiming that ‘every other picture book’ was now about animals doing human things. Research seems to bear her out – a 2002 review of around a thousand children’s books found that over half featured animals, but fewer than 2 per cent depicted animals realistically. Hyman continues: ‘It says, Henrietta’s First Trip to the Dentist. Well, Henrietta’s a racoon, you know, with Nikes and a little pink dress on. And the dentist is a rhinoceros … Why couldn’t Henrietta be a kid and the dentist be a real dentist?’ The answer is perhaps that we feel animals create a distance that makes the mundane more magical; the morals easier to swallow. But, interestingly, the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) found that, in a 2017 study of nearly a hundred children, those who heard a story about human characters sharing became more generous, while those who heard the same story with an anthropomorphized racoon actually became more selfish. If we want our picture books to give children moral lessons, perhaps we do need more real kids and real dentists.

For good or ill, though, the genre became big business with Dick Bruna, whose titles include: Miffy goes to the Zoo, Miffy in the Snow, Miffy at the Seaside, Miffy’s Birthday, Miffy at the Playground, Miffy in Hospital, Miffy and the New Baby. In the book I have in front of me now, Miffy at School, there is no narrative arc beyond her conformity with the school’s routine. In a crowd of other girl bunnies who share her face, Miffy learns to get up early, to sit for the register, to do her sums. Parents and educators have bought over 85 million of these books, hopeful of inducting their children into such adorable obedience.

Bruna apparently had the inspiration for Miffy when he saw a little rabbit in the dunes with his one-year-old son, Sierk, so told him a story. Early on she had floppy ears – it took until 1963 to refine her into the rabbit we now know, and an English translator, Olive Jones, to come up with her name Miffy (she had originally been Nijntje, a shortening of Konijntje – ‘little rabbit’ – in the Dutch). Soon though, influenced by Matisse’s collages, Bruna refined Miffy into a minimalist masterpiece.

Every book has only 12 pages, each 16 × 16 cms. Each page has one picture and four lines of verse. Bruna uses a thick black line and – like the De Stijl movement – a pared-back palette of poster paints (in his case: black, white, red, yellow, blue, green and orange). Miffy always looks directly towards us. Her rabbit-ness is distilled to this: two ears and a cross for mouth and nose.

Everything is similarly stripped to a kind of Zen simplicity – Bruna told Lisa Allardice, in an interview for The Guardian, that making Miffy sad could take days as he might begin with five tears then try to cut back as much as possible: ‘At the end I have one big tear, and that is the saddest tear you can have.’

In this minimalism, Miffy also ushered in something else. She is picture book character as logo. Almost no one can recall a Miffy story, yet we all know her from the endless product – placemats, mugs, aprons, greeting cards, lamps, totes, magnets. In this she was so ahead of her time, her image seems startlingly modern. Bruna followed Beatrix Potter’s lead and took the merchandising to another level – especially merchandising to young girls. He led a quiet life, its only real narrative in the later years being his legal case against Sanrio for their imitation of Miffy, Hello Kitty, whose habit of wearing pink particularly disturbed him (he claimed it was ‘not a proper colour’), and whom he sued for copyright infringement when they introduced Kitty’s friend Cathy, a familiar-looking rabbit.

Miffy is an animal who is no longer an animal. In one remarkable book in the series, called simply Miffy, Bruna even tells the story of her birth, where an angel appears in Mrs Bunny’s garden and says she shall have her wish for a baby granted. Miffy, like Jesus, is born utterly innocent, untainted by animal sin (her parents clearly not at it like rabbits). She isn’t made of fur or pie-meat. She is a brand, a proto-emoji. Caldecott’s bunny girl cleansed of guilt.

Bruna talked of wanting to leave space for young children to project on to her, and however hard we look, Miffy just stares straight back at us with those two dots.

She is the face in our mirror, and we look so cute.